What Happens When You Give Up Sugar for Good?

When one Swedish mom put her entire family on a sugar-free diet, she thought it might help them kick their cravings for sweet treats, but she didn’t expect it to change her daughter’s entire behavior.

In a Facebook post that’s since been shared more than 2,400 times, Anna Larsson, 38, explained that after realizing how bad her daughter’s sugar cravings had become something had to give. When her daughter threw a tantrum one day after being denied a sweet treat, Larsson says she cut sugar out of their diet completely.

While the first few days were tough, Larsson says her daughter soon stopped asking for sugary yogurts or pastries and instead started looking forward to healthy snacks, like cut-up cucumbers and peppers, or roasted potatoes.

More surprising, however, were the behavioral changes Larsson saw in her daughter. According to her post, Larsson’s daughter went from throwing tantrums about every little thing to calming down, falling asleep quickly in the evening. She even “did not want to look at the television all the time, she wanted to do things," according to Larsson's Facebook post.

The BBC points out that there’s little research that supports the idea that sugar affects behavior, but Larsson says that her daughter’s “taste buds are like new,” and that “we know that it’s bad to give a lot of sugar to kids, or to anyone, so it’s not news.”

Larsson’s not necessarily wrong about that. Some experts believe that sugar might be worse for you than previously believed and that cutting down on sugar is the key to combating the obesity and diabetes epidemics in the U.S.

Larsson also stressed that she's not banning her daughter from eating sugar ever again. "I never said you cannot have sugar...but you cannot eat it every day," she told the BBC.

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